Infinite Y-Axis Printing

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Blackbelt 3D, their fully funded project has caught the 3D printing market by storm.

At present, the market has stalled in terms of new innovation. The only advances seem to be Chinese manufacturers making advances on expired patents and pushing on the SLA / DLP (Stereolithography / Digital Layer Printing) front.

Till now . .

This product takes advantage of the processes technical detailing ability and tries to push the mass manufacturing capability of an FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) printer.

How is this different from conventional FDM printing? In figure 1 is a traditional cartesian printer where the y-axis is a fixed entity.

With this new style of printer, the y-axis is “infinate” and can now print large length products such as beams, hull sections. The products on a traditional style printer would require the model to be broken down into sections, now it can be seamlessly printed.

What makes this new product exciting is it can be potentially controlled via a live printing module such as octoprint, which can initiate a filament change via a Mosaic Palette + for example. No more stop/start sequences which can save print farms thousands per year in time savings, allowing the manufacturing line to continuously run non-stop.

Now HyperCube users (an open-source 3D printer) are taking on the challenge of upgrading their printers with rolling y-axis’ with promising results.

Overall it’s interesting times for the future of additive manufacturing, SGD will be looking into investing in this technology in the near future to streamline its services.

If your company is interested in enquiring about professional 3D printing services with SGD then click here

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